Name: The Works of H. Rider Haggard
Rating: 4.24 (4 reviews)

Author 10 books27 followers

December 4, 2021

This volume collects four of H. Rider Haggard’s novels: Cleopatra, She, King Solomon’s Mines, and Allan Quatermain. I don’t think I’ve read any of them yet, though I may have read “She” as a teenager, and I’ve read Alan Moore’s take on Quatermain.

Besides being a collection of great stories, this is a beautiful volume. It looks like it’s part of a set of volumes, perhaps a series of “One Volume Editions” from “Black’s Readers Service”. The book feels wonderful in the hand, possibly leather-bound, and delightfully heavy; the pages are on quality paper that really does make a difference in the enjoyability of reading. (This is something that Quatermain, always complaining about his ugliness, would be jealous about.) There’s a red silk-like bookmark for placemarking.

Cleopatra

“The goose on the wing laughs at crocodiles, so goes their saying down in Alexandria; but when the goose is asleep on the water, it is the crocodiles who laugh.”

Having read The Classic Adventures: Ayesha: The Return of She/Benita: An African Romance about two years ago, I was aware that Haggard can be a difficult read. None of that prepared me for the archaic style of Cleopatra. It’s written as the memoirs of a disgraced Egyptian priest, translated into English by an unnamed translator. Here’s a somewhat random passage:

“Wait, O Queen,” I answered; “thou hast not seen all.” And even as I spoke, the serpent seemed to break in fragments, and from each fragment grew a new serpent. And these, too, broke in fragments and bred others, till in a little space the place, to their clamored sight, was a seething sea of snakes, that crawled, hissed, and knotted themselves in knots. Then I made a sign, and the serpents gathered themselves about me, and seemed slowly to twice themselves about my body and my limbs, till, save my face, I was wreathed thick with hissing snakes.

Reading that on its own, I start thinking of how it would be translated into D&D. It appears that this is an illusion rather than a variation on the fourth level sticks to snakes spell. Reading it while reading the book, however, I never once thought about how the various events and actions might fit into a roleplaying game because it was both too engrossing and too consuming a read. Until I got about a third into the book, and became familiar with the writing style, it was hard going; I considered skipping to She, which I expect is more appealing to modern readers.

But the further I read, the more engrossing it was, and the more tragic. Haggard masterfully tells us everything that’s going to happen while still keeping us hanging on what’s going to happen next. This is a Shakespearean tragedy in what I would call the Dumasian style, though it may simply be a more general style of the era. It’s historical fiction similar to The Three Musketeers: it uses historical figures and events; it is an especially difficult subgenre because it specifically sets out not to change the historical events.

In some ways, Haggard and Dumas are precursors to secret histories of the style of more modern writers epitomized by Tim Powers. Cleopatra is especially reminiscent of Powers because it is assumed that magic works and supernatural beings exist and if you have the right eyes you can see their effects on the world.

It’s an extraordinarily sad tale, marred only slightly by the somewhat abrupt and unnecessarily stereotypical ending; I suspect the purpose was to make it even more tragic by snatching from Harmachi even the ability to get in a last word, but Harmachi’s storytelling style was compelling enough that depriving us of his last words was too disappointing to justify even thematically.

Throughout the book there is the occasional reference to “Her”, who I assume is Isis and not a reference to the “She” of Haggard’s later novels, though I did wonder initially.

And woe be to the sword that snaps in the hour of battle, for it shall be thrown aside to rust.

She

The unknown is generally taken to be terrible, not as the proverb would infer, from the inherent superstition of man, but because it so often is terrible. He who would tamper with the vast and secret forces that animate the world may well fall a victim to them.

A young man discovers his ancient heritage, unbroken since the time of the Pharaohs—and an unfulfilled promise of revenge he must carry out. He travels to east Africa and discovers the ruins of a civilization more ancient even than the Egyptians.

This civilization, Kor, appears to have been advanced in some ways that look like magic, although the only link to this civilization, the eponymous She, is adamant on multiple occasions that “There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the secrets of Nature.”

The narrator of the story is more interesting than the main character. Ugly, strong, intelligent, his life experience inclining him to misogyny.

Curses on the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse that begets it!

But that makes him even more susceptible to the amoral evil that is Ayesha, the She who must be obeyed.

And then for the rest, when had such a chance ever come to a man before as that which now lay in Leo‘s hand? True, in uniting himself to this dread woman, he would place his life under the influence of a mysterious creature of evil tendencies, but then that would be likely enough to happen to him in any ordinary marriage.

Haggard creates an amazing lost world, with a history spanning thousands of years and a subsequent ruin also spanning thousands of years. He plays on Mark Twain’s joke from about twenty years earlier that mummies were so common they were used as fuel; here, the mummies of Kor are practically unnumbered, and used for celebratory bonfires. To make it even more grisly, the mummies of Kor use a more advanced technique than Egypt had (the narrator suspects that refugees from Kor influenced Egypt but could not duplicate the full technique) and so the mummies thrown on the fire are not wrapped, and look completely lifelike. Not just that they could have died yesterday, but as if they were still alive.

This is, as I suspected while reading Cleopatra, much more readable than that. While it’s still a rambling and wordy narrative, it lacks (except in Ayesha’s dialogue) the antiquated language. Haggard, or his narrator, even pokes a little fun at his own philosophical rambling.

Ayesha is an obsessive, evil, amoral woman, probably what we would today call a sociopath. But she is also gifted with an extreme beauty and charisma (possibly, judging from the backstory, from the same treatment that made her nearly immortal) that allows her to overcome any resistance, at least among men. Haggard does a fine job writing a narrator who both recognizes the evil and succumbs to the beauty.

Now that I’ve reread this, I’m going to have to reread The Return of She.

King Solomon’s Mines

Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner.

The only thing I know about Allan Quatermain is from Alan Moore’s wonderfully weird League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Based on that and on the first two novels in this collection, I was expecting high adventure and ancient magic. Instead, this novel is even more different from the first two than She was from Cleopatra. If there’s magic, it is only in a backstory that we don’t get, and the adventure is a slog through desert and heat, and bloody battles with ambiguous outcomes.

Our only enemies were heat, thirst, and flies, but far rather would I have faced any danger from man or beast than that awful trinity.

Allan Quatermain narrates this story as a very different person than the narrators of the previous two. Haggard seems a master at inhabiting the heads of vastly different narrators. The language in this story is more modern than both of the previous, since neither the narrator nor any character in it speaks in an archaic tongue.

One of the really interesting secondary aspects of this story—and I suspect just as interesting to contemporary readers, if not more so—is that Haggard deliberately makes race a central issue. Quatermain either reflects or acknowledges his times when he, in his narration only, suggests that Captain John Good should not have fallen in love with the native—as if people have a choice of who to fall in love with in a story like this. But Good himself appears to be contemplating a genuinely good relationship with Foulata, and Good, like Sir Henry Curtis (a very Poul Anderson-ish hero who rounds out the trio of adventurers) are both viewed by Quatermain as the more heroic and more honorable of the three. Or at least, that’s the way he writes.

Perhaps more interesting to modern readers, Foulata’s King, at the end of the story, is quick to take offense when Quatermain, Good, and Sir Henry decide that they prefer home to staying on as the King’s special council; and in that conversation we see hints of the general rule in stories such as this that those who helped the king before his ascension are best served by getting out of the way after his ascension.

Quatermain is a moderately unreliable narrator. It is difficult to trust him when he calls himself a coward, which makes the rest of his self-denigration difficult to be sure about as well. His shyness is perhaps more believable, since he has spent most of his life alone or among very few people in the wilds of Africa as a hunter and trader.

Rudyard Kipling and Haggard were, apparently, friends, and I can see a little of Kipling’s later The Man Who Would Be King in it.

Mine has been a rough life, my reader, but there are a few things I am thankful to have lived for, and one of them is to have seen that moon rise over Kukuanaland.

Allan Quatermain

…the beauty of a woman is like the beauty of the lightning—a destructive thing and a cause of desolation.

Quatermain’s final adventure is a wonderful ending to the series and to this collection. The fantasy magic is minimal—limited to a prophecy that could well have been deliberately invoked—but the magic of the writing is complete. The whole thing is written casually, clearly by Quatermain and not some omniscient author, although we do get some insight into Quatermain’s humility in a postscript “by"“ Sir Henry Curtis. In that postscript, we get to see one of the fights Quatermain was involved in from Curtis’s perspective, and are expected to transfer that knowledge to all of Quatermain’s protestations of cowardice.

Quatermain’s jealousy Curtis takes more seriously, and it is a very human and universal jealousy among old friends.

There is also the universal jealousy of man and woman, sometimes presented humorously.

At last Nyleptha drew a final sketch of the rising sun, indicating that she must go, and that we should meet on the following morning; whereat Sir Henry looked so disappointed that she saw it, and I suppose by way of consolation, extended her hand to him to kiss, which he did with pious fervor. At the same time Sorais, off whom Good had never taken his eyeglasses during the whole indaba [interview], rewarded him by giving him her hand to kiss, though, while she did so, her eyes were fixed upon Sir Henry. I am glad to say that I was not implicated in these proceedings; neither of them gave me her hand to kiss.

Quatermain’s humor is even more apparent in his choice of what to present from his companion’s. One character carries an axe, and…

By a piece of grim humor he had named this axe, “Inkosi-kaas,” which is the Zulu word for chieftainess. For a long while I could not make out why he gave it such a name, and at last I asked him, when he informed me that the axe was evidently feminine, because of her womanly habit of prying very deep into things, and that she was clearly a chieftainess because all men fell down before her, struck dumb at the sight of her beauty and power. In the same way he would consult “Inkosi-kaas” if in any dilemma; and when I asked him why he did so, he informed me it was because she must needs be wise, having “looked into so many people’s brains.”

The ending, and the new prophecy, place a capstone on an incredible adventure and character.

The Works of H. Rider Haggard

H. Rider Haggard

About the author

H. Rider Haggard

Ratings & Reviews

Friends & Following

Community Reviews

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for?